xsparse

 [image of the Head of a GNU]


Table of Contents


Introduction

Xsparse is an auxiliary program that expands condensed sparse files back to their original state. You will need this utility if you have a POSIX archive, created by GNU tar, which contains sparse members and need to extract files from this archive using a third-party tar, that does not support sparse extensions.

Downloading

The utility is distributed in source form: xsparse.c.

You can also download it from the GNU tar CVS repository.

Compiling

To compile the utility, run

cc -oxsparse xsparse.c

Usage

Refer to Sparse Recovery section for the detailed discussion of xsparse and its usage.

Following is a short usage summary:

xsparse [OPTIONS] infile [outfile]

Available OPTIONS are:

-h Display a short help summary.
-n Dry run: do nothing, only print what would have been done. This option implies -v.
-v Increase verbosity level.
-x FILE Read extended header variables from FILE.

Valid XHTML 1.0!